Howard Bahr's fourth novel, "Pelican Road," takes its name from the "207 miles of ballasted heavyweight main line rail between Meridian, Mississippi, and New Orleans. The name had always been there, older than the railroad, older than any of the men who worked on it now." That expanse is the setting of this atmospheric tale; the time is Christmas Day 1940, when travelers are going home in anticipation of various reunions, heads filled with dreams and memories.

Pelican Road by Howard Bahr

Bahr has a true, old-fashioned writer's resume -- he was a gunner's mate in the U.S. Navy, a brakeman and yard clerk on railroads, curator of Faulkner's Home, Roanoke -- and he draws on every bit of his experience and formidable talent to create this portrait of men at work, doing their best at a perilous enterprise.

His characters are always conscious of the riskiness of travel by steam locomotive, the dangerous nature of the work itself, the constant vigilance required to keep life and limb together. Early on, the reader learns that life can turn on a dime, in a horrifying moment when a black man is caught between a car coupling and pays with his life.

Death is never far away when men have harnessed heavy metal and steam to do their bidding. But the real enemy, coupled with equal force to the train, is the passage of time itself, and the mortal race against it, the race men are doomed to lose every time. The engineer of the southbound train on that Christmas Day is A.P. Dunn, who has suffered a bad fall, and finds himself drifting mentally between a remembered train trip in 1923 and his 1940 run. The brakeman on the northbound train is Artemus Kane, a man torn between his own past experiences in the war and his relationship with Anna Rose Dangerfield, a woman writer he has come to love in New Orleans.

These are men who live by a complicated code, driven by a heightened sense of awareness. "Stay in sight. Stay out from between cars. Don't couple air hoses in a cut that's not blue-flagged. Don't be afraid. Don't hesitate. Pay attention. Watch out. Watch out. Death is always there -- in the slick grass, in the moment when you think of your girlfriend, in the great wheels turning --waiting for you to forget. So don't forget."

This is a snapshot of a bygone era, beautifully captured in Bahr's poetic prose: "The crowds swept by, each person more or less anxious, each trailing a complicated life, long or short, that had brought him to this moment. For them, the Silver Star had nothing to do with the process of their lives; a train was only a bridge over time to a place where life would be continued, the journey itself only a hiatus, a passage to some other morning, afternoon, darkness where love or decision or catastrophe awaited. The trainmen understood this, and they were aware of the secret lives that passed before them." What keeps the trainmen going? The power of the engine itself, the feeling of being part of history, the excitement of a passenger train about to get under way.

Bahr has packed so much life into this novel: We can feel the jolts of the car and the cold blasts that come up through the deck plates, smell the smoke, see the tension in the men's faces. This novel teems with life itself, its hopes, its challenges, its regrets. In the end, we are reminded that we are all, like Artemus Kane, "an instrument of the world's changing."

Book editor Susan Larson can be reached at slarson@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3457.